by Duncan MacLaren

The father of Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez OP, has died at the age of 96 in his Dominican priory in Lima.

Born in Lima on 8th June 1928, as a bright young man with a priestly vocation, he was sent to study theology in Belgium, France and the Gregorian in Rome where he was ordained a diocesan priest in 1959 before returning to Peru. He taught at the Catholic University in Lima while working in a poor parish in the city and acted as a theological consultant to the Medellín gathering of Latin American bishops in 1968 to discern how the Second Vatican Council could be adapted to the Latin American context.

Out of that mixture of learning from study, his brush with bishops from all over his continent as well as the Vatican Curia and his encounter with the poor in his parish in a deprived area of Lima came his magnum opus, The Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation published in 1971 in his native Spanish and in 1973 in English. It is widely regarded as one of the 100 most important theological works of the 20th century.

His book emerged from an era of military dictatorships and revolutionary guerillas in many Latin American states but Gustavo was led, not to join the revolutionaries but, always a man of the ecclesia docens, ecclesia discens, to ponder the question “How do you say to the poor, ‘God loves you’?”. That led to a theological movement which he says in his Theology of Liberation is suffused with a theology which does not stop with reflecting on the world, but rather tries to be part of the process through which the world is transformed. It is a theology which is open to the gift of the Kingdom of God in the protest against the plunder of the vast majority of people, in liberating love, and in the building of a new, just, and fraternal society.

Dr Duncan MacLaren is Convenor of the Glasgow Lay Dominicans and a former member of the International Dominican Justice and Peace Commission.